How Biased Is Your Announcer?

A 30-Team Study Shows Some Baseball TV Teams Don't Play It Straight; 'The Good Guys'

ENLARGE

White Sox announcer Ken 'Hawk' Harrelson is unapologetic about which team he roots for.
Associated Press

By

Jared Diamond

Updated Sept. 26, 2012 1:21 p.m. ET

If you're wondering what's going on in the American League Central pennant race over the next week, all you need to do is tune into a Chicago White Sox telecast and listen for the voice of the team's play-by-play man, Ken "Hawk" Harrelson.

Harrelson is, to put it diplomatically, a bit of a "homer." In other words, he's unapologetic about his devotion to the White Sox, the team he routinely calls "the good guys." According to one measure, Harrelson and his booth partner, Steve Stone, make more nakedly biased statements during a single game than every other TV broadcast team in the American League combined.

"Let's just say that if we're losing, you're going to know it," Harrelson said in a recent interview. "I won't sound happy."

The conventional wisdom in sports is that TV announcers should strive to call the game straight down the middle. It's a philosophy that's been embraced over the years by most of the famous baseball voices.

Harrelson has taken a decidedly different approach. He considers himself the biggest White Sox fan on the planet. It just so happens that he's paid to talk about them. He's known for begging long fly balls (Stretch! Stretch!) to soar over the fence and imploring the players for key hits. He even criticizes calls that don't go Chicago's way. In May, he went on a rant against umpire Mark Wegner, saying that he "knows nothing about the game of baseball." After that outburst went viral, he met with Commissioner Bud Selig and ultimately apologized.

ENLARGE

"Everybody I work with, I tell them, 'I announce my (butt) off for my team,'" he said.

Prompted by Harrelson's unabashed homerism, the Journal decided to watch one nine-inning game played by every major-league team to evaluate its local broadcasters for bias. To keep things simple, we only evaluated home games that the home teams won.

By the rules of our study, anyone with a microphone who used a pronoun like "we," "us" or "our" to describe the home team was given a citation. Obscure pet names for players were also flagged: The Detroit Tigers announcers, for instance, referred to backup catcher Gerald Laird as "G-Money." Additional penalties were given for things like excessive moping after miscues or unrestrained glee after big moments. (A Miami Marlins broadcaster marked the end of a lengthy scoreless drought by screaming "Hallelujah!")

It didn't take long for the study to confirm what many baseball observers have long expected. During the White Sox game—a 2-1 win against the Texas Rangers—Harrelson and Stone (but mostly Harrelson) made a whopping 104 biased statements.

To put that in perspective, the Cleveland Indians duo of Matt Underwood and Rick Manning ranked second with just 23 biased comments and 24 of the 30 teams had fewer than 10.

"You just made my day," Harrelson said when told of his place in the biased standings. "That's the biggest compliment you could give me, to call me the biggest homer in baseball."

While Harrelson wears his bias as a badge of honor, every other crew made at least some effort to appear impartial. Five of the broadcast teams made it through their games without a single biased comment: the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Blue Jays.

Broadcasters in larger markets were generally less biased: After the White Sox, the next four teams in the rankings were the Indians, Pirates, Astros and Marlins—all small-market franchises.

This may not be a coincidence: Curt Gowdy Jr., the senior vice president of production for Mets broadcasts on SNY, said that in a "highly opinionated" market like New York, the fans wouldn't take well to their announcers being blatant homers. "The 'we' and 'our' cannot be in the vocabulary," he said.

Cleveland's duo wasn't afraid to criticize the home team and didn't engage in much rah-rah cheering. Their No. 2 ranking came because they often said "we" instead of "they." The culprit was usually Manning, who spent more than eight seasons playing for Cleveland. The announcers declined to comment.

"Former players have tremendous equity in the franchise they played for," said Minnesota Twins play-by-play man Dick Bremer, who works with Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven. "From their perspective, I could imagine a strong desire for the team to do well."

That doesn't explain Harrelson, though: He played nine years in the majors, but never for the White Sox. His rampant bias is more a product of his—admittedly unorthodox—philosophy toward broadcasting.

Harrelson doesn't subscribe to the idea that local announcers must strive for objectivity. Because they cater specifically to viewers who care deeply about the team, they should care along with them. He called a few national games early in his career but stopped accepting those assignments, having discovered his distaste for playing it down the middle.

There's reason to believe all announcers may be secretly rooting for the team they call—and Harrelson is just the only one who shows it.

Tigers announcer Rod Allen, who played briefly for Detroit in 1984, said "It's important that when you can, you put a positive spin on the things that are going on."

Philadelphia Phillies announcer Tom McCarthy added, "We're all homers whether we want to be or not," in part because they spend so much time around the team.

Still, both Allen and McCarthy said that there is a line broadcasters shouldn't cross, where their homerism begins to undermine their credibility. Or as Mets color commentator Ron Darling put it, "There are going to be people watching who demand that you get it right, and they'll let you know when you don't get it right."

If Harrelson crosses that line, he doesn't seem to mind. "I have my detractors, no doubt about it," Harrelson said. "I look at it as a compliment."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.